The Development of Spatial Memory Analyzed by means of Ecological Walking Task

The present study is aimed at investigating the development of spatial memory in pre-school children aged 4-6 years using an ecological walking task with multiple rewards. The participants were to explore an open space in order to find nine rewards placed in buckets arranged in three spatial configurations: a Cross, a 3x3 Matrix and a Cluster composed of three groups of three buckets each. Clear age-related improvements were evident in all the parameters analysed. In fact, there was a general trend for younger children to display worse performances than the older ones. Moreover, males performed better than females in both the search efficiency and visiting all buckets. Additionally, the search efficiency proved to be a function of the difficulty of the configuration to be explored: the Matrix and Cluster configurations were easier to explore than the Cross configuration. Taken altogether, the present findings suggest that there is a general improvement in the spatial memory abilities in preschoolers, and that solving an open space task could be influenced by gender. Moreover, it can be proposed that both the procedural competences and the memory load requested to explore a specific environment are determined by its specific features

Measurements of Backscattering from a Dihedral Corner in a Reverberating Chamber

In this paper, the backscattering of a dihedral corner is evaluated by measurements accomplished within the reverberating chamber (RC) of the Università degli Studi di Napoli Parthenope, formerly Istituto Universitario Navale (IUN). The obtained results are found in good agreement with those of a previous very accurate model, whose validity was assessed by anechoic chamber measurements

Sensitivity to gait improvement after levodopa intake in Parkinson’s disease: A comparison study among synthetic kinematic indices

The synthetic indices are widely used to describe balance and stability during gait. Some of these are employed to describe the gait features in Parkinson's disease (PD). However, the results are sometimes inconsistent, and the same indices are rarely used to compare the individuals affected by PD before and after levodopa intake (OFF and ON condition, respectively). Our aim was to investigate which synthetic measure among Harmonic Ratio, Jerk Ratio, Golden Ratio and Trunk Displacement Index is representative of gait stability and harmony, and which of these are more sensitive to the variations between OFF and ON condition. We found that all indices, except the Jerk Ratio, significantly improve after levodopa. Only the improvement of the Trunk Displacement Index showed a direct correlation with the motor improvement measured through the clinical scale UPDRS-III (Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale-part III). In conclusion, we suggest that the synthetic indices can be useful to detect motor changes induced by, but not all of them clearly correlate with the clinical changes achieved with the levodopa administration. In our analysis, only the Trunk Displacement Index was able to show a clear relationship with the PD clinical motor improvement

Il sistema contabile e la struttura di gobernó del "Campansi" nella seconda metà dell'ottocento

In every city community, there always exist social, economic and political- administrative bodies, whose activities and organisational structures delineate and convey the historical and cultural periods experienced by that community.The city community we aim at investigating is the Sienese one. Siena is universally recognised for its medieval reminders, as well as for those of the Renaissance, distinctly appreciable in its current urban patterns, painting pieces, and cultural goods, of which it is plenty and rightly proud.The organisation we identified as one traditionally characterising –at least in the last century and a half- and still characterising the Sienese history and culture, is the Ricovero di Mendicità, later named Casa di riposo in Campansi per anziani, unanimously known as "Campansi".Undoubtedly, the Campansi one is not the only institution whose structural and operational evolution contributed – and keeps on contributing- to shape the history of Siena, from the social, political and institutional points of view. Nevertheless, it is surely one of the most peculiar ones, in that it has been involved in those charitable activities, which exalted Siena since the second millennium, at the time of the restoring and propitiatory journeys to the main religious destinations: Rome, Jerusalem, and Saint James of Compostela.In this study we adopt a business administration perspective, with particular reference to the structure of the accounting system and its related documentation, which the organisation had been producing in order to memorise, summarise and communicate its administrative events, these latter occurring from the exercise of its institutional function. Moreover, we acknowledge the related governance structure, selected with the purpose of making operational decisions, verifying their execution, and controlling the deriving effects. As a matter of fact, there is a tight interdependency between the governance structure and the accounting system of whichever organisation. Particularly, the investigation refers to the period we considered the most significant and interesting, the one comprised between the issuing of the law "Sull'Amministrazione delle Opere pie" (3rd August 1862) and law "Istituzioni pubbliche di beneficenza", in 1890, respectively known as Rattazzi and Crispi law, from the Prime Ministers in charge at the time of their enactment

The kinectome: A comprehensive kinematic map of human motion in health and disease

Human voluntary movement stems from the coordinated activations in space and time of many musculoskeletal segments. However, the current methodological approaches to study human movement are still limited to the evaluation of the synergies among a few body elements. Network science can be a useful approach to describe movement as a whole and to extract features that are relevant to understanding both its complex physiology and the pathophysiology of movement disorders. Here, we propose to represent human movement as a network (that we named the kinectome), where nodes represent body points, and edges are defined as the correlations of the accelerations between each pair of them. We applied this framework to healthy individuals and patients with Parkinson’s disease, observing that the patients’ kinectomes display less symmetrical patterns as compared to healthy controls. Furthermore, we used the kinectomes to successfully identify both healthy and diseased subjects using short gait recordings. Finally, we highlighted topological features that predict the individual clinical impairment in patients. Our results define a novel approach to study human movement. While deceptively simple, this approach is well-grounded, and represents a powerful tool that may be applied to a wide spectrum of framework

On the Evaluation of the Shielding Effectiveness of an Electrically Large Enclosure

The shielding effectiveness (SE) has become a fundamental step in testing active or passive electric devices. The Reverberating Chamber (RC) is a well- established method for determining the SE since has the advantage to expose the material to a more realistic environment. In this paper the SEe of electrically large enclosures with a metallic mesh grid in a RC is evaluated. Enclosures made with metallic mesh are considered. In particular, it is shown that the SE of a material is unable to provide complete information for the SEe of an electrically large enclosure made with the same material. Moreover, this latter one is related to the loading conditions within the enclosure itself. Measurements accomplished at RC of the Università di Napoli Parthenope (formerly Istituto Universitario Navale, IUN) confirm the physical soundness of the proposed approach

A night of sleep deprivation alters brain connectivity and affects specific executive functions

: Sleep is a fundamental physiological process necessary for efficient cognitive functioning especially in relation to memory consolidation and executive functions, such as attentional and switching abilities. The lack of sleep strongly alters the connectivity of some resting-state networks, such as default mode network and attentional network. In this study, by means of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and specific cognitive tasks, we investigated how brain topology and cognitive functioning are affected by 24 h of sleep deprivation (SD). Thirty-two young men underwent resting-state MEG recording and evaluated in letter cancellation task (LCT) and task switching (TS) before and after SD. Results showed a worsening in the accuracy and speed of execution in the LCT and a reduction of reaction times in the TS, evidencing thus a worsening of attentional but not of switching abilities. Moreover, we observed that 24 h of SD induced large-scale rearrangements in the functional network. These findings evidence that 24 h of SD is able to alter brain connectivity and selectively affects cognitive domains which are under the control of different brain networks

Visuospatial working memory abilities in children analyzed by the bricks game task (BGT)

The study of the development of visuospatial memory processes is useful for devising personalized educational interventions as well as for understanding the changes in cognitive functioning in an era characterized by technological progress. The present research is aimed at investigating spatial working memory ability in children that attended the first three years of primary school by means of the Brick Game Task (BGT), a novel visuospatial working memory test. BGT is a small-scale ecological test inspired by behavioral walking tasks with nine white bricks in different spatial configurations as well as to Corsi Block-Tapping test. 228 Italian children (121 F; mean age: 7.22 ± 1.18) were assigned to three groups based on the primary school class attended: Group 1 (N = 85; 40 F; mean age 6.18 ± .5), Group 2 (N = 61; 36 F; mean age 7.2 ± .83), and Group 3 (N = 82; 44 F; mean age 8.32 ± .94). All participants were asked to complete the Digit Span test, the Corsi Block-Tapping test, and to explore the three spatial configurations of the BGT with the form of Matrix, M-BGT, Cluster, CL-BGT, Cross, CR-BGT. MANOVA revealed a main significant effect for Group (F12,434 = 15.06; p < .0001) indicating that the group of older obtained a better global executive performance than 1 and 2 groups. Multiple linear regression indicated that Corsi Block-Tapping test performance and Age significantly predicted the M-BGT score. Moreover, Corsi Block-Tapping test and Digit Span significantly predicted the CL-BGT performance, showing how a higher score results in a better CL- BGT performance. Finally, Corsi Block-Tapping test, Digit Span, and Age were positively associated with the CR- BGT performance. The present findings evidenced that novel BGT is a sensible visuospatial working memory task suggesting thus its use to assess the children’s executive performance in ecological way. These results open to the development of personalized educational interventions

Topological changes of brain network during mindfulness meditation: an exploratory source level magnetoencephalographic study

We have previously evidenced that Mindfulness Meditation (MM) in experienced meditators (EMs) is associated with long-lasting topological changes in resting state condition. However, what occurs during the meditative phase is still debated. Utilizing magnetoencephalography (MEG), the present study is aimed at comparing the topological features of the brain network in a group of EMs (n = 26) during the meditative phase with those of individuals who had no previous experience of any type of meditation (NM group, n = 29). A wide range of topological changes in the EM group as compared to the NM group has been shown. Specifically, in EMs, we have observed increased betweenness centrality in delta, alpha, and beta bands in both cortical (left medial orbital cortex, left postcentral area, and right visual primary cortex) and subcortical (left caudate nucleus and thalamus) areas. Furthermore, the degree of beta band in parietal and occipital areas of EMs was increased too. Our exploratory study suggests that the MM can change the functional brain network and provides an explanatory hypothesis on the brain circuits characterizing the meditative process